The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  “Ben,” Brandon entreated, “I’ve loved your daughter since we were teenagers, and apparently she’s now in love with me. Fact is, we’d like to get married, sir, and I hope with your blessing.”

  Ben’s response was unanticipated: “Now, let me get this straight. You’re asking me whom I’d prefer as a husband to my daughter; you or some fellow who tried to have me thawed so he could get at the money in my trust fund? Quite a dilemma.” He grinned. “Welcome to the family, son.”

  Ben Smith embraced Brandon Butters, just like the jubilant bear hug in which Toby Fiske had enveloped him on the day Marge gave birth to Gary. It reminded Ben that even in so joyful a moment, there yet remained in his life plenty of unresolved grief, all connected with his irrevocably deceased wife and estranged son.

  The first of hundreds of media reviews that day was entered by Alec Auberty, art critic for the Dallas News Syndicate:

  I happened to be born in the 1990s; the decade when the pitched battle between science and mysticism for the hearts and minds of the human race at last began to draw even. We hadn’t the means to know it then, but after eons of domination by the malevolent forces of darkness and ignorance, civilization stood at the very threshold of our Millennium of Hope. I remember first being told, at the age of seven, that life began on planet Earth some three billion years ago.

  Like most of my generation, since childhood I have tried to imagine that miracle. Today, for the first time, I not only visualized the moment, I felt it.

  In creating what is perhaps this century’s most important artistic accomplishment, a composition of unrivaled splendor, palpability, and eloquence, Gary Franklin Smith has single-handedly restored my faith that humans can achieve feats of which machines shall never be capable…

  By midnight, The Dawn of Life would tally over forty million viewer hours, a record-shattering statistic destined to be broken by the same work again and again over the coming weeks, months, and years.

  As rave reviews mounted that day, Gary knew that his father would be proud and happy for him. Yet he was shocked to realize that his father’s pride gave him no gratification. The fact that Ben would feel self-satisfaction tainted Gary’s sense of accomplishment; damaged his own joy.

  What the hell was wrong with him? he wondered. Why couldn’t he get past his father and just appreciate his own life? He would tell no one of this feeling, not even Kimber.

  December 31, 2083

  —Chrysler Motors Corporation’s recently revived DeSoto division unveils a fully operational prototype of its Sport-Explorer Hovermobile. The machine, which hovers on an air cushion at 16 inches above ground, includes one noteworthy new option, a manual override control. The vehicle will traverse almost any terrain without environmental consequences, and can scale up to a 60-degree grade with no loss of forward momentum. Chrysler’s rather optimistic sales slogan is: “VR can’t touch it!”—On the third day of his self-induced cold, medical historian Daniel Appel finally instructs his nanomachine immune system to banish the virus from his body. He explains, “Three days was about all I could stand, and I think I can now remember the feeling well enough to describe it in my next text. The last time I was sick was nearly half a century ago, and you forget what it’s like. It’s amazing to realize that people once lived with illness as a normal part of their lives. Since 2055, only 17 other humans have sustained any viral illnesses lasting more than a few minutes.

  Gary Franklin Smith and Kimber Chevalier had been married two months when they hosted a New Year’s Eve celebration at their luxurious new home, inviting only relatives, plus Toby and Father Steve. Almost every member of her family attended, and Kimber had insisted upon inviting Gary’s entire family as well, especially her new father-in-law.

  To his delight, she embraced Ben at the door and escorted him inside.

  “My dear girl,” he said. “Of all my son’s extraordinary successes, winning your heart was to me his most gratifying.”

  She giggled with unembarrassed mirth. “Come. I want you to meet my parents and grandparents…”

  While he chatted with his son’s new in-laws, Ben Smith made up his mind about something he’d been mulling for a long time. It wasn’t the perfect answer, but it was the best he could do.

  Ben knew his daughter-in-law would be the perfect ally. Thus, later that evening, with Kimber present as a buffer, he told his son: “I’ve decided to clone your mother.”

  Gary ceased all motion and speech, as if disconnected from a power source.

  “I have a lock of her hair,” Ben added. “Trip tells me that’s enough.”

  “But she won’t be… Mom,” Gary finally said. “She’ll only be a stranger who looks like Mom.”

  “Not exactly,” Ben explained. “Every person clones differently, and even every identical clone is raised in a unique way. So she’ll be an entirely different person, genetically the same as your mother, only without life-experience. She’ll know us soon enough, though, and love us, just like Alice does.”

  “Who else have you told?” Gary asked.

  “Your sisters, moments ago. And Brandon.”

  “What do they think?”

  “Didn’t ask for their opinions. I’m pretty sure Rebecca’s for it. The others, well, I can’t really tell yet.”

  “Do you propose to bring her back as an infant or an adult?” Gary’s voice was now evenly modulated. But a tiny muscle danced at a corner of his mouth.

  “Haven’t decided yet. Either way, I need your support, because I have to do it.”

  “Dad, I’m not—”

  “Ben,” Kimber interrupted, pulling Gary’s right arm, “will you excuse us for just a few minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  When the couple returned six minutes later, Ben was chatting with Brandon, Jan, Katie, and me. Kimber spoke. “If you decide to bring your wife back as an infant, Gary and I would like to raise her.”

  Ben stared at her. Now it was his turn to feel profoundly disoriented. “That’s a wonderful offer. But a mother raised from infancy by her own son?”

  “Actually,” Brandon volunteered, “it’s quite common now for people to raise clones of their parents from infancy. There’ve been at least five million PCI parenting licenses issued over the last few years. In fact I’ve never heard of anyone being turned down—other than multiple requests, of course.”

  Ben marveled at how quickly the latest revivs seemed to assimilate. Sure, Brandon had been studying to become a eugenics counselor, but barely ten months ago, he was still in suspension. Now he was talking about this stuff as though it had been common practice his entire life.

  “That’s quite an interesting statistic, honey,” Jan said. “But what’s your opinion about it?”

  “I think it’s normal for orphans to want to resurrect their parents,” Brandon said. “I mean, if you’ve decided to have a child anyway, why not have one with the exact genetics of a lost loved one?”

  “Are there many clones of currently living people?” Katie asked.

  “Uncommon,” Brandon said. “Not too many of us want exact duplicates of ourselves around, and of course nobody can clone a living person without that person’s permission.”

  “Sure you want to do this, Kimber?” Ben asked. “It’s much harder to raise someone from infancy…”

  “And more satisfying, too,” Kimber said. “In a way, it would be Gary’s tribute to his mother. Besides, it should be less traumatic for the new Marge to be raised as a normal child than to become conscious as an adult with only generic, impersonal knowledge and no experiential memory. Besides, the AIs say clones raised from infancy are less likely to get lost in, or overuse, modern addictions. I know how important that is to you, Ben.”

  “Not only that,” Brandon added, “an infancy cloning would give you both more time to decide if you really want to spend the rest of your lives together.”

  “Oh. I just kind of assumed we would. But I guess…”

  “It usually does work out tha
t way, Ben,” Brandon said, “simply because the same qualities that attracted the original couple to each other would still exist. But not always. At least it hasn’t always happened with adult clonings. Too soon to compile meaningful statistics on infants, though, since most clonings of deceased spouses have occurred within the last decade.”

  “Boy,” Katie said, “this stuff makes my head spin. Back when I was suspended, I thought I was taking a risk donating my corneas. But now I know at least a dozen people who’ve been revived from just their frozen heads.”

  “I interviewed a married couple last week,” Brandon said, “both revived from their brains alone. The amazing thing is that he had killed her, almost seventy-five years ago. Set her afire in a fit of rage, and received the death penalty for it.”

  “Then what happened?” Katie asked.

  “I offered to have his brain frozen for revivification research, and he accepted. Six decades later, the state revives him by cloning his body to house his brain, and cures his mental illness. He starts a successful business, builds a new life, and revives his wife; his own murder victim! Now they’re married again, happily, this time.”

  “Amazing,” Jan said, “especially to anyone from our generation. During the twentieth century, if you’d predicted anything like that would happen, I’d’ve called for the men in the white coats!”

  Kimber turned toward Gary. “Shows the healing power of time.”

  Ben smiled to himself. Gary must have understood her point, he decided. It wasn’t subtle.

  “When I viewed the AudioVid record soon after the crime itself,” Brandon said, “I could never have foreseen this outcome. But I guess a lot of people reconcile after a divorce. Well, this was a divorce, albeit by the ultimate means. Plus, he did arrange for her reviv, and he’s fixed in the sanity department. She loved him once, so maybe it’s not that shocking.”

  “Sure it is,” Gary said with a playful smile.

  Brandon laughed. “Yeah, come to think of it…”

  “But the fact that it could happen at all,” Gary said, “shows that the information in your brain is what really matters. Too bad Mom’s brain wasn’t frozen.”

  Ben nodded sadly, as guilt over a 104-year-old lapse bubbled to his consciousness.

  “Anyway, what do you say, Dad?” Gary asked. “You want us to raise her?”

  “Bringing her back as an adult would be easier,” Ben said. “And two decades is a long time to wait…”

  “Nothing like it used to be,” Katie said. “I once thought two would be my whole life, and now I hope to have at least a hundred more!”

  Ben stood silently, distracted by thoughts of the real Margaret Callahan Smith. Forever lost. “Okay,” he finally said. “For the next twenty years Marge’s clone will be your daughter. Then I hope she’ll become your mother, too. Or is it stepmother?”

  Brandon shrugged.

  Ben turned toward Gary. “Just don’t go telling her I’m not good enough for her!”

  Gary barked a laugh and wondered if it sounded as forced to the others as it did to him. “I’ll try not to influence her either way.”

  September 30, 2090

  —AIs in Atlantis, the third largest underwater city, have cracked the language of Dolphins in the North Atlantic, allowing humans to converse with the only species on earth possessing a comparable brain/body weight ratio. Zoologists predict a revolution of interspecies communication as a result of the software advances. Dolphins are expected to be among only a handful of species capable of expressing actual thoughts beyond emotional and instinctual responses.—The WASA board of trustees decides to go ahead with plans to complete within this century the Ceres XIV humaned space station, well outside of Pluto’s orbit. “Even though we now have three similar stations that pass within 200 million miles of Ceres XIV’s proposed course,” WASA Chief Iruy Niragig explains, “the new outpost will nonetheless be a technical milestone, the first ever positioned outside our solar system.”—The last functional warship on Earth leaves service today with the decommissioning of the 2030s-era Typhoon III-class missile submarine ROSTOV 146. The “boomer” has spent its last 45 years of service as an event vessel for World presidents on vacation cruises. Long vilified as a waste of taxpayer funds, the sub will now serve as a museum attraction, beginning with Disney-St. Petersburg’s grand opening.

  On Margaret Callahan Smith’s sixth birthday, the home of Gary Smith and Kimber Chevalier overflowed with three dozen children, most of their parents, and nine adult members of the Smith clan, not to mention seven holographic dinosaurs, six rented portable child-size VR machines, two mechanical spaceship simulators, hair and skin recoloring systems, and Margaret’s enormous new android-doll undersea biosphere, her birthday gift from Ben.

  “Sure glad nobody’s spoiling her,” Ben joked to Kimber.

  She laughed. “Yes, I’m afraid Margaret’s upbringing may be somewhat different from that of the original.”

  “Times do change,” he said. “I’ll try to think of this as our own anecdotal experiment on heredity versus environment.”

  Then Margaret leaped into his arms. “Hi, Ben. I love my new biosphere!”

  She never called him Grampa, nor did she refer to Gary as Dad, even though Kimber was always Mom to her. All the guides on raising well-adjusted transgenerational clones suggested they be taught to use first names for double relations, or potential double relations.

  “And I love seeing you smile, sweetheart,” he said. Of course he did! It was the same smile he’d cherished since he was fifteen.

  Gary felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Not that Ben had done anything wrong, or even indecorous, but what his unworthy father had in mind for their sweet little girl—that they would someday get married and have sex together—was unacceptable and not a little weird. Sure, he understood the original idea, but was no longer confident that he could handle it.

  “Ben,” Margaret asked, “I’m a clone, right?” It was a typical Margaret question, seemingly formed from the very ether.

  “Right, honey,” Ben answered, half hoping that would be the end of it, even though with her, it never was. Margaret was inquisitive, which Ben admired, but which also occasionally left him unstrung.

  “What does that mean? A clone.”

  “It means you have only one biological parent; your genes came from one person, my wife, Gary’s mother.” Ben doubted she’d grasp the entire concept, but didn’t know how else to express it. “You look just like her,” he added.

  “Is a clone as good as anybody else?”

  “Sure. In some ways better. You were chosen to be like somebody special, somebody others loved. Your parent was so wonderful, we didn’t think the world could do without you!”

  “Where’s the first me? Can she come today?”

  “Oh, no, honey. She would’ve loved to be here with you, but she can’t come.”

  “Why?”

  “She died, sweetheart.”

  The child pouted. “Died? How?”

  “Well, first she got very sick…”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know how sometimes you stub your toe, or cut your knee, and the invisible little-girl-fixing-machines have to take care of it? And until they do, it kinda hurts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, a long time ago, germs or viruses and things like that—sort of like those invisible machines, only bad ones—would hurt us. And sometimes our bodies would fix themselves, or else doctors could help fix them. But we didn’t have invisible machines back then, so sometimes we didn’t get better at all.”

  “Never?” she asked. “Is that what happened to the other Margaret? The other me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then she went to sleep forever; never woke up.”

  “Forever? Like Brenda, my guppy?”

  Ben nodded.

  Margaret looked up in amazement. “But why?”

  “Because back then, everybody grew old, and
nearly everyone died. They died forever, because we didn’t freeze people.”

  “Why?”

  “Because hardly anyone had thought of it yet.” Damn. Why hadn’t he listened to Carl? “We just didn’t know. Not really, anyway.”

  She thought about this for a moment. “You didn’t die forever.”

  “No, I didn’t. I was lucky.”

  “But you knew people who died forever, right?”

  “Yes. I knew many people who died.” He swallowed hard, fighting back his emotions. “Too many.”

  Margaret looked at Ben. Her expression was so lost-Marge, he had to look elsewhere. Little Margaret shone with the same sympathy his wife had radiated so easily to those in pain, most often to Gary. (And who had caused that pain?) Then she hugged him. “Oh, it must have been sad back then.”

  “Yes.” He knew he should say more, but couldn’t. “But now it’s better, right?”

  “Yes. Much.”

  “I’m so happy you didn’t die, Ben.”

  “Me, too, sweetheart. Very, very happy.”

  Alice, who’d overheard most of the conversation, put her arm around Ben’s waist, whispering, “You handled that well.”

  “Did I?”

  “It’s not easy knowing what to say to a child. And knowing what to withhold.”

  “Especially when she’s much more than just a child; when she’s also my future wife, I hope.”

  Alice embraced him. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “I get so angry sometimes, mostly at myself,” Ben admitted. “Carl Epstein told me about cryonics back in 1971. I could easily have afforded it, too, but never even thought about it for Marge, or anyone.”

  “Guilt directed against yourself is useless,” she said, her words sounding much like an Alice-of-old lecture.

  His mother’s memory was lost, but maybe not her essence. Why was it so hard to discern exactly what was still there and what was missing?

  “Those who use it against others,” she continued, “wield it as a weapon. And battles against self have only losers. Ben, you have to let go of it; it wasn’t your fault, just the way things were. In the 1970s almost every cryobiologist was saying that cellular damage from freezing would never be reversible. Of course, cryobiologists were the wrong experts to ask, since they knew nothing about molecular technology. But hardly anyone had figured that out, just Feynman, Ettinger, Drexler, Merkle, and a very few others.”